The 6th of June 1944. Allied infantry and armored divisions begin landing on the Normandy coast
in France. This largest seaborne invasion in history marks a turning point in World War 2
and becomes the beginning of the end of the war in Europe. One week later on the 13th of June 1944,
Nazi Germany responds with the first V-1 flying bomb attack carried out on London.
More than 2,500 V-1s will reach London killing more than 6,000 innocent civilians.
The first V-2 rocket, the world’s first long-range guided ballistic missile,
hits London on the 8th of September 1944. These terrifying Revenge weapons with which
the Nazis would terrorize people in London until March 1945 are produced thanks to slave
labor from Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp. Its commandant is Otto Förschner.
Otto Förschner was born on the 4th of November 1902 in Dürrenzimmern then part of the German
Empire. Förschner spent his early years on his parents' farm in Bavaria and in 1922 he enlisted
in the Reichswehr - the German armed forces. He would remain a soldier for the next twelve years.
On the 30th of January 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany by
German President Paul von Hindenburg. Immediately after Hitler came into power,
Germany became a dictatorship, and the Nazi regime quickly began to restrict the civil
and human rights of the Jews and established the first concentration camps, imprisoning
its political opponents, homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, and others classified as “dangerous”.
The first concentration camp - Dachau - was established in March 1933, less than
2 months after Hitler became the chancellor. Between 1933 and 1945, Nazi Germany and its
European allies would establish more than 44,000 camps and other incarceration sites,
including ghettos. The perpetrators would use these locations for forced labor,
detention of people deemed to be "enemies of the state," and the mass murder of millions.
In 1934, one year after the Nazis came into power in Germany, Otto Förschner joined the SS. Between
April 1934 and December 1936, Förschner attended the SS training camp at Bad Tölz which was one
of the SS-Junker Schools leadership training facilities for officer candidates of the SS.
Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, intended for these schools to mold cadets for future service
in the officer ranks of the SS. In these training facilities cadets were taught to
be adaptable officers who could perform any task assigned to them, whether in a police role, at a
Nazi concentration camp, as part of a fighting unit, or within the greater SS organization.
Political and ideological indoctrination was part of the syllabus for all SS cadets but there was
no merger of academic learning and military instruction like that found at West Point in
the United States. Instead, personality training was stressed, which meant future SS leaders were
shaped above all things by a National Socialist worldview and attitude. Instruction was designed
to communicate a sense of racial superiority, a connection to other dependable like-minded men,
ruthlessness, and a toughness that accorded the value system of the SS.
Förschner attended the academy until December 1936
and on the following year he joined the Nazi Party.
The second world war began on the 1st of September, 1939 when Germany invaded Poland.
Nazi Germany possessed overwhelming military superiority over Poland.
Germany launched the unprovoked attack at dawn on the 1st of September with an advance force
consisting of more than 2,000 tanks supported by nearly 900 bombers and over 400 fighter planes.
In all, Germany deployed 60 divisions and nearly 1.5 million men in the invasion
The assault on Poland demonstrated Germany’s ability to combine air power and armor in a new
kind of mobile warfare. The world adopted a new term to describe Germany’s successful war tactic:
Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war.” The last operational Polish unit surrendered on the
6th of October. The Polish Campaign, in which Otto Förschner took part, was the first action
by Hitler in his attempt to create Lebensraum meaning living space for Germans. Nazi propaganda
was one of the factors behind the German brutality directed at civilians that had
worked relentlessly to convince the Germans into believing that Jews and Slavs were subhumans.
On Sunday, the 22nd of June 1941 started Operation Barbarossa,
the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Förschner took part in the attack with the
5th SS Panzer Division Wiking. SS Division Wiking was an infantry and later an armoured
division among the thirty-eight Waffen-SS divisions of Nazi Germany.
It was recruited from foreign volunteers in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland,
Estonia, the Netherlands and Belgium under the command of German officers.
After Förschner was wounded in action and declared medically unfit for combat duty,
he returned to Germany and in the spring of 1942, he was transferred to the Buchenwald
which was one of the largest concentration camps established within German borders.
Prisoners lived in the Buchenwald main camp which was surrounded by an electrified
barbed-wire fence, watchtowers, and a chain of sentries outfitted with automatic machine guns.
At the entrance to the main camp, there was a notorious punishment block, known as the Bunker,
where prisoners who violated the camp regulations were punished and often tortured to death.
In addition to the punishment block, the main camp included 33 wooden barracks, disinfection
buildings, a brothel, and a crematorium. Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were
political prisoners, people who had been arrested for some form of political opposition to the Nazi
regime. In addition to the political prisoners and Jews, Buchenwald prisoners also included
repeat offenders, Jehovah's Witnesses, Sinti and Roma people and German military deserters.
In September 1943, Förschner was given command over the newly built
concentration camp of Mittelbau-Dora which was originally a subcamp of Buchenwald. Prisoners
from Buchenwald were sent to the area in 1943 to begin construction of a large industrial complex.
There were no sanitary facilities except for barrels that served as latrines. Inmates,
the majority of them from the Soviet Union, Poland or France, died from hunger, thirst,
the cold and overwork. During the first months, most of the work done was heavy
construction and transport. Only in January 1944, when production of the V-2 rockets began,
were the first prisoners moved to the new above-ground camp on
the south side of the mountain. Many had to sleep in the tunnels until May 1944.
In October of the same year, the SS made Mittelbau-Dora an independent
concentration camp with more than 30 subcamps of its own.
The slave-laborers from Mittelbau-Dora were used not only for production of V-weapons
such as the V-1 flying bomb and V-2 rockets which were aimed primarily at London, but
also to extend the nearby tunnels in Kohnstein which is a hill that served as a natural
protection against the Allied bombing for the underground factory named Mittelwerk in which
the V-weapons were produced. These so-called Weapons of Retaliation, as the Germans called
them, were constructed and stored in the underground facilities and bomb-proof shafts.
The inmates at Mittelbau-Dora were treated in a brutal and inhumane manner,
working 14-hour days and being denied access to basic hygiene, beds, and adequate rations.
Prisoners too weak or ill to work were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau or Mauthausen to be killed.
The inmates were subject to extreme cruelty and as a result, they often
suffered injuries, including permanent disability, disfigurement, and death.
Severe beatings were routine, as was deliberate starvation, torture and summary executions. In
many cases the prisoners were compelled to hang other prisoners under penalty
of execution if they failed to cooperate. There was an order issued by Förschner that
prisoners who refused to assist in the execution of other prisoners would themselves be executed.
Around one in three of the roughly 60,000 prisoners who were sent to Mittelbau-Dora died.
In the camp, one of Förschner’s duties was preventing acts of sabotage during
V-weapons production. To ensure that the camp ran smoothly, and such activities did not occur,
Förschner relied on German Communist prisoners as administrators in positions that were not
required to be held by the SS officers. However, after the investigation in the autumn of 1944,
the Gestapo, the official secret police of Nazi Germany, revealed that his approach,
which they criticized as soft on both the camp's prisoners and personnel, let to resistance
activities inside the camp such as sabotage during V-weapons production and many of the Communist of
the prisoner functionaries who he had appointed, were involved in these sabotage activities.
In addition, in early 1945 Heinrich Himmler found out that Förschner,
technically the managing director of Mittelwerk factory, had received a bonus payment of
10,000 Reichsmarks. However, he had not reported this one-off payment to the SS administration,
who nevertheless found out and demanded a refund. However, Förschner did not pay it back.
Soon after, Himmler himself removed Förschner from his position.
In February 1945 Otto Förschner became a commandant of Kaufering which was the
common name of a system of eleven subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp system.
The conditions in Kaufering were horrible. The prisoners deported to each of the 11
subcamps had to construct the accommodation themselves. The resulting huts, partially buried
for camouflage from aerial reconnaissance, were completely inadequate for the weather conditions.
Rain and snow leaked through the earthen roofs, and vermin infested the huts. Prisoners had
to sleep on straw that had been spread on the floor. What little food the prisoners did have,
was taken by the SS guards and those who were sick, were fed even less. There were
even incidents of cannibalism, and some prisoners were so desperate to escape from their horrible
reality that they would try to commit suicide, by throwing themselves into the electrical fencing.
Most of the prisoners were forced to work building railway embankments and hauling bags
of cement for the bunker-building projects. The bunkers were to be used for producing
different components of the Messerschmitt Me 262A aircraft, the first operational jet aircraft,
which the Germans hoped would turn the tide of war against the Allies.
However, not a single aircraft was produced here before liberation. The murderous conditions
meant that most prisoners were incapacitated in a short time and due to severe vermin infestation,
prisoners spent time attempting to rid themselves of fleas when they were supposed to be working.
In December 1944, out of 17,600 prisoners, only 8,319 were capable of work, including those only
capable of light work. Because the companies that hired the workers complained that they had to pay
for the labor of prisoners who were unable to work, transports totaling 1,322 or 1,451
people were dispatched to Auschwitz in September and October 1944, where the victims were gassed.
Förschner was accused of numerous crimes at Kaufering such as mistreating the prisoners,
killing one prisoner with an iron pipe and management of prisoner executions.
As US armed forces approached the Kaufering complex in late April 1945,
the SS began evacuating the camps, sending the prisoners
on death marches in the direction of Dachau, either on foot or by train.
Those inmates who could not keep up, were often shot or beaten to death by the guards.
Kaufering was the largest of the Dachau subcamps and also the one with the worst conditions.
During its existence between June 1944 and April 1945, fifteen
thousand out of 30,000 prisoners died from hunger, disease, executions, or during death marches.
Otto Förschner remained the camp’s commandant until the end of April,
1945 when he was taken prisoner by the US Army.
In the end, justice finally caught up with Förschner when
he was tried at the Dachau trials which held him responsible for the brutal conditions at
Kaufering concentration camp as well as his role in the management of prisoner executions.
On the 13th of December, 1945 the US military tribunal found
Otto Förschner, a married man and father of 3 children, guilty of war crimes committed
during his tenure at Kaufering and sentenced him to death by hanging.
He was 43 years old when he was executed on the 28th of May 1946.
There were no tears shed for Otto Förschner.
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